What’s in a Name? How the Eleventh Circuit Ignored the Fourth Amendment to Hold That a Warrant for One Person Authorizes the Detention of Others

Authors

Jared McClain, Institute for Justice
Dylan Moore, Institute for Justice

Abstract

Odds are, your name isn’t all that unique. Most people share the same first and last name with hundreds, if not thousands, of other Americans. The frequency with which people share a name raises an important question of civil rights: What happens when officers arrest and detain an innocent person based on an arrest warrant that was issued for someone else with the same name?

In the Eleventh Circuit, the answer is almost always “nothing.” So long as a mistaken detention lasts three days or fewer, officers are free from accountability for apprehending the innocent—even if those officers have good reason to know that they’ve locked the wrong person behind bars. In short, if the names match and the detention is shorter than a holiday weekend, government officials are automatically in the clear—no matter how egregious their mistake.

This circuit-specific doctrine was born from a 2023 en banc decision called Sosa v. Martin County, which assessed a mistaken-identity detention under only the substantive-due-process component of the Fourteenth Amendment. And given the modern judiciary’s reluctance to meaningfully protect substantive rights through the Due Process Clause, Sosa left the innocent victim powerless to recover against the officers whose mistake landed him in jail solely because he shares a name with someone wanted for a crime.

But as Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum suggested in her Sosa dissent, the Eleventh Circuit has housed its mistaken-identity-detention precedent in the wrong constitutional provision. The right to be free from arbitrary arrest and detention is enumerated in the Fourth Amendment, which expressly safeguards “the right of the people to be secure in their persons . . . against unreasonable . . . seizures.” When mistaken-identity detentions are analyzed under the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness framework, it becomes clear that the Constitution does not countenance the Eleventh Circuit’s three-days-in-jail exception to a person’s freedom.

Recommended Citation

Jared McClain and Dylan Moore, What’s in a Name? How the Eleventh Circuit Ignored the Fourth Amendment to Hold That a Warrant for One Person Authorizes the Detention of Others, 79 U. Mia. L. Rev. 783 (2025)
Available at: https://repository.law.miami.edu/umlr/vol79/iss4/9